Poetic Licence

Fear is a strange inheritance. It doesn’t care how many acres your family once farmed or how many verses your anthem carries. For some, the end of political dominance feels like an apocalypse. And so they run; not from bombs or famine, but from a world no longer arranged in their image. These are not refugees of war, but of reckoning. Fugitives of a fiction they once authored, now the story has collapsed, but they are still trying to live as if it is true. 

A few Afrikaners are seeking asylum in the United States, claiming persecution in democratic South Africa. The irony is rich. The same South Africa whose black majority once had to actually flee, shackled by passbooks and banned ideas, now stands accused of chasing away its former masters. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, and so telling. 

In this imagined flight from farm murders and supposed racial hostility, the facts are the first to disappear. 

Yes, rural crime is real. So is violent inequality. But numbers tell no tale of genocide. There is no system, no state-sponsored purge, no pogrom. What there is, is a country groaning under the weight of its history, and the growing pains of a stillborn reconciliation. 

What we’re witnessing is not persecution. It is displacement of a different kind: the psychological unraveling of those who can no longer command the narrative. When power slips, some mistake equality for attack. They recast justice as injustice. And so they fashion themselves martyrs in a story where they were once monarchs. 

The theatre of whiteness is global, but in South Africa, the act is wearing thin. There is a desperation to reclaim innocence, to rewrite victimhood in reverse. In applying for refugee status abroad, these fugitives are not just running from a country, they are running from accountability. From memory. From the unbearable fact that their discomfort is not oppression.  

What’s most fascinating is how poorly this myth travels. In the U.S., where whiteness is also being dragged, screaming, into shared space, there is no automatic red carpet for the Afrikaner refugee. No one is fast-tracking them to privilege. The passport of whiteness is still powerful, yes, but it's guarantee is no longer universal. And perhaps that’s the real crisis: Whiteness, once a guarantee of power and belonging, now floats unanchored in a world no longer built to centre it.

Meanwhile, real refugees drown in oceans and deserts, their trauma untelevised, their bodies unwelcome. For them, refugee is not a metaphor, it is a sentence. To equate this with the anxious twitch of former elites is an insult to suffering.

So let them flee, if they must. Let them clutch their myths and applications and tell foreign lands how hard it is to live among those they once ruled. But don’t ask us to mourn their departure. South Africa is not killing them. It is simply no longer indulging their fiction.

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